Back in the early days of Hollywood, movies were silent, so it didn’t matter who made what noise on the set during filming because there were no microphones to pick up any unwanted noise. So when Universal Studios head, Carl Laemmle realized that moviegoers were intrigued about how movies were made, in invited the general public to see for themselves. To give guests a better view, he ordered a Visitors Observation Platform built. Each person paid 25 cents for which they got a boxed lunch and a chance to see exactly how tedious it could be to make movies. Those doors underneath the platform opened into small dressing rooms where the actors could change costumes. All this might look rudimentary but from such humble beginnings, the world-famous Universal Studios theme park began.

Guest ticket into Universal Studios, 1915:

The filming that the guests were looking at probably looked a lot like this shot of a motion picture being filmed in 1917 at the  Vitagraph Studio (today, Prospect Studios) at the corner of Prospect and Talmadge Avenues in the Los Feliz area of Los Angeles.